Pot Thoughts and Pot Shots

Pot thoughts might refer to David Brooks’ getting all “making men moral” when thinking about legalizing marijuana. Or he is getting all proudly Epicurean? My big thoughts on David and weed here, which aren’t anything you haven’t heard before.

Pot thoughts can also refer to thoughts you have as a result of ingesting marijuana in some way. I haven’t had those for several decades, despite what you might have thought while reading my emo post on that decadent hippie song about smiling on your brother.

Pot thoughts might also refer to thoughts you have during what turn out to be some people’s few moments of privacy and leisure—sitting on the pot.

It’s reported on the thread below: What are men for? Men are better at installing and repairing. (Woman are better at spreadsheets etc.) That really is true. And there’s still big money available to those who can do those things well. Certainly one Republican goal should be helping out those manly enough to install and repair in a self-employed way. Why did I forgot this obvious fact? I’m not good at installing and repairing. We have to remember, though, that increasingly it’s those women with their spreadsheets who are telling installers and repairers what to do. I’m not good with spreadsheets either.

Should we be worried by what’s being reported here and there on the web (I’m not going to link for fear of causing undue alarm)? The Japanese Fukushima nuclear meltdown is completely out control. It’s already frying the Western part of our country, and it threatens all life in the Pacific. Some fear a government-imposed news blackout is why we don’t know more.

I followed Pete’s advice and read NATIONAL AFFAIRS. You need to read Olsen on the Republicans’ “empathy gap” and his proposition that the two candidates presented clear-enough visions in 2012, and voters really preferred the president’s. If we don’t follow Olsen’s and Pete’s advice and face up to that fact, the same thing happens in 2016 .

While at Barnes and Noble this afternoon, I read an article in MOTHER JONES about the huge and extravagant role “Team Devos” (the Amway guys) played in the victory of “freedom-to-work” over the trade unions in Michigan. Am I right to regard the withering away of trade unions as a pretty ambiguous new birth of freedom? The article also reported in passing that the Democrats’ biggest billionaire is about environmentalism. What do unions care about that?

Ivan the K let me know that, according to a Lingua Franca blog, the word most looked up in 2013 was SCIENCE. I’ll say more about this later.

I also read at B and N a fair-and-balanced article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS that explains that the reason both sides were so brutal during the Spanish Civil War is that most of the people of Spain had no interest in fighting for either side. And so they had to be terrorized into taking sides.

I also read an article by a professor of sociology in FA about the inevitability of America having a progressively more social democratic future. It was completely unconvincing, ignoring as it did the birth dearth.